Reporting & Analytics

A dashboard is only useful if somebody changes what they do because of it. Plenty of factory dashboards are beautiful and completely ignored, because they answer questions nobody was asking or arrive after the shift that could have acted on them.

So I build these backwards, starting from the decision rather than the chart. Who looks at this, when, and what do they do differently depending on what it says. If there is no answer to that, the chart does not get built.

What gets built

Production KPI dashboards that show the current state against the plan. OEE monitoring broken into availability, performance, and quality, so the number points somewhere rather than just going down. Digital SQDC boards replacing the whiteboard, visible to everyone rather than only the people standing in that room at that hour. Factory performance views for management. Cost and variance reporting that connects operational data to money. Quality reporting sitting on the same data as the production side, so the two stop disagreeing.

The part that matters more than the charts

Most reporting problems are not visualisation problems. They are data problems. Numbers live in three systems and two spreadsheets, definitions disagree between departments, and nobody trusts the total because last time it was wrong.

So the work usually starts underneath the dashboard: getting the data into one database with one definition per metric, automating collection so it is not somebody’s morning job, and making the history queryable. Once that exists, the dashboard is the easy part, and more importantly it is trusted.

Real time, honestly

Genuine real time needs data sources that can deliver it, and many plants do not have those yet. I will tell you plainly what your current data supports. In practice, reporting that lands reliably at the start of each shift changes far more decisions than a live display fed by numbers people quietly doubt.